Where the Bodies are Buried (44 page)

Angela cast a tearful eye to her side, where her father’s coffin lay waiting for the mounds of earth either side to be shovelled
over him for ever.

‘We’ve discussed it and we’re all agreed that it should be yours if you want it. We’ve no doubt it’s what Dad would have wanted,
especially if he’d known what you just did.’

Angela filled up again, her face creasing once more with grief.

‘Just … think about it and let us know,’ she said, her voice cracking at the end.

Jasmine nodded solemnly and Angela walked away to where her husband Mark was waiting, holding open the rear door of a black
funeral car.

The red Civic was parked somewhere in the caravan of mourners’ vehicles along the narrow one-way road that snaked through
the cemetery, striking an almost inappropriate note of vivid colour among the black cars and black clothes. Everyone was heading
to a nearby hotel for more hugs, tears and sausage rolls. Jasmine would catch them up in a little while.

She walked among the graves, looking at dates going back a century. Rows of little white lines, giving off their secret heat.
One of them was her mother’s, if she could get her bearings and find it. Yes, she remembered now: just along from the mausoleum
of some Victorian businessman. She hadn’t been back here since the funeral, partly because she didn’t want to revisit such
a scene of pain, but largely also because she didn’t see the point. It wasn’t a place to remember her mum, because she’d never
been
here with her. It was just where her body lay, no more infused with her essence, with all the things that made her herself,
than that quarry had been infused with the essences of Jim or the Ramsays or anybody else who had been buried there.

Still, she always felt guilty about not going, like it was some kind of daughter’s duty she was neglecting.

The headstone was there now. She remembered getting a letter about it, with an acknowledgement that the fee had been paid
through some kind of insurance. It should have given her a more pressing impetus to return to the cemetery, but at the time
she just wasn’t strong enough. This would be her first time of seeing it. She suspected it would upset her, in particular
the dates: the finality of that second one, bracketing a life and rendering all its deeds and possibilities finite.

The dates did not upset her, though. She was too distracted by the name, because in its unaccustomed formality, it looked
like a mistake.

Her mum was Beth: that was how she was known to friends and colleagues, to anyone she ever stopped to talk to on the street
when Jasmine was dawdling at her side, tugging Mummy’s hand to move along.

Beth, always Beth. Letters would say ‘Elizabeth’ sometimes, if it was something official or junk off a mailing list, but neither
Beth nor Elizabeth was actually her first name. As Jasmine remembered now, that was her middle name.

Jasmine assumed that she just preferred Elizabeth, but realised that she must have gone by her given first name once, because
Jim would call her by it occasionally. He’d refer to her as Yvonne, then correct himself, like Mum used to when she referred
to her old pals by their maiden names.

There it was: written in stone. Yvonne Elizabeth Sharp.

And that was when Jasmine shuddered, like the cold rain had run off her brolly and poured straight down the back of her neck.

The Fallan file.

CLIENT: YES.

There had been no invoicing details. That was because Jim was doing it for nothing. He was tracking down Glen Fallan for her
mum, and he’d found him, but that wasn’t all.

Jasmine recalled Jim’s upper-register handwriting on the notes and saw now how she’d misunderstood it, assuming that it referred
simply to Jim having got in touch with Ingrams. What it had actually said was ‘INGRAMS CONTACTED YES’, and a date.

Glen Fallan had been to see her mum shortly before she died.

Catherine was lying awake again. It was close to three o’clock on Sunday morning, and what was making it worse was that somebody
would have to be up with the boys at seven, and it was her turn. Drew had got up yesterday, albeit Catherine didn’t get a
lie-in then either. She and Laura had been due to go and pick up Dominic to escort him to the Ramsays’, and Drew had sorted
the boys with breakfast and taken them swimming so that she would have time to make herself presentable.

She had woken around twenty past two and couldn’t get back to sleep. Why couldn’t she sleep?

It had been a good day. A tiring day, in all the best ways. When Laura brought her back home, it wasn’t yet eleven. It was
a clear, sunny day. Cooler than it had been, with a breeze that promised autumn, but way better than anyone living in this
part of the world had ever come to expect for late August.

She and Drew had taken the boys to Loudoun Castle for the rest of the day, down in Ayrshire. They had been going there for
a couple of years, and despite Catherine’s natural aversion to theme parks, she always found it curiously relaxing and a little
quaint: its verdant setting making it seem all the more like a place where old amusement rides were put out to pasture. The
boys adored it, of course, and every time they came back, it seemed they had each grown tall enough to be allowed on one more
attraction than last time.

After that, they had gone out for dinner, the four of them, to the little Italian place round the corner where the staff had
made a fuss of the boys since birth. Could have been there she made her misstep, taking a large espresso after dessert. Surely
not, though: it had been around seven. Coffee only did this to her normally if she had one at the end of a meal out without
the kids and was drinking it after ten.

She didn’t have any trouble getting to sleep; in fact had slipped away so pleasantly it was like she was on opiates.

She and Drew had made love, and this was definitely making love. It had been very tender, very intimate, very
slow,
and very quiet, apart
from towards the very end when she couldn’t help herself. Drew had threatened to put a pillow over her face lest she wake
the boys, which had made her giggly and thus only added to the intensity of the orgasm and her vocal appreciation of it.

She felt a long way from sleep now. Not worried or anxious, but the way she felt when there was something unresolved between
them, a matter that they hadn’t had the time or the inclination to discuss. There was nothing wrong between them, though,
nothing she was turning over in her head.

That was just it, however. It was something that wasn’t between them. It was something she kept hidden, in the heart of that
place Drew knew she went, angry on the road there and unreachable when she arrived.

They had talked plenty today, making the long walks between different areas of the park, while the boys ran ahead, zigzagging
back and forth across the paths. She had apologised for becoming obsessive, and Drew had acknowledged that it wasn’t something
that happened all the time, just that it had come on the back of a difficult couple of months.

He said he understood that it would always be part of the deal that she would be withdrawn at times, as there were certain
things he was grateful that she didn’t bring home from work with her. However, he argued, there were times when she was clearly
carrying a burden she shouldn’t try to shoulder alone.

She had talked a little about Fallan, enough to offer him something by way of explanation, but same as with Laura, she hadn’t
talked to either of them about the real reason he disturbed her, the real source of this wellspring of hatred.

Lying awake once again in the dark, she kept thinking of what Laura had said, about how people didn’t need to be defined by
the worst things that happened to them, and about how perhaps they could change.

She started replaying today’s conversations in her head, trying to capture the thing that would not let her rest, the bird
that was loose in her attic.

‘So this guy Fallan helped you?’ Drew had said.

‘He wasn’t helping me. He was helping himself, and helping Jasmine Sharp, though I’m not quite sure why. I was just an auxiliary
beneficiary.’

‘But either way, he was on your side. Doesn’t that open the door just a wee bit to forgiving him?’

Drew suggested this warily, afraid he’d get his head bitten off even though they were standing among dozens of people, watching
the boys on a merry-go-round.

‘I’m just saying,’ he clarified. ‘You’ve never told me what went on with your family back then, and I respect that you don’t
want to, but it still twists you up inside even now. It’s easy for me to say, I know, but a lot of people maintain that forgiveness
can be liberating.’

‘He’s not looking for forgiveness. I don’t think he even remembers.’

‘But what are
you
looking for? It’s not him that needs forgiveness. Maybe it’s you who needs to forgive.’

And there it was, the bird, ceased flapping around and temporarily come to rest. Motionless for the moment, but that didn’t
mean it could easily be captured, nor that it couldn’t take wing again and resume bouncing off the walls.

Maybe all she needed was to open a window. That wouldn’t be simple either, though.

Drew was right about one thing and wrong about another.

It wasn’t Glen Fallan that Catherine needed to forgive.

The wind had picked up in recent days, all the more blustery on the higher ground of Northumberland, where it was claiming
the first dry leaves. The colours weren’t yet turned; grass still growing on the roadside verges enough for cutting work to
be slowing down the traffic. It felt between seasons, between times: something not quite over, something else not quite begun.

As she drove up to the refuge, she could see Fallan to the side of the house, holding a leaf-blower in one hand like it was
a dust-buster. He wore dark green camo trousers and a sleeveless T-shirt, just as he’d been dressed when she first met him.
She didn’t think the outside temperature would ever have much bearing on his gardening attire, as he seemed the kind of man
for whom hard graft was enough to keep him warm.

She felt nervous almost to the point of nausea at the sight, his very familiarity and an instinctive warmth at seeing him
again now adding to the turbulent mix churning inside her. She’d felt less apprehensive the first time she came here, and
no more confident of being told the truth.

He didn’t smile when he saw her, but he did stop what he was doing and walk across to greet her. There was warmth in his expression,
but worry too, like he was pleased to see her but somehow not happy she was here.

No preamble, she thought. She’d never get through it; it would only make the main event more enormous.

‘I found bank statements,’ she began, and from his expression she could tell he was not even going to attempt to pretend this
could mean anything else. ‘My mum’s, from 2007 onwards. She was receiving payments every three or four months from a company
called Morningstar. I called the bank and they told me the installments went back twenty years.’

Jasmine paused, trying to keep her voice steady, trying to hold her nerve.

‘Morningstar is an anagram of Tron Ingrams,’ she stated, as blankly as she could manage.

Fallan said nothing. He folded his arms as though he was suddenly feeling the cold, that rarely glimpsed expression of vulnerability
about his face and his posture.

‘I know you went to see her, not long before she died,’ Jasmine continued. ‘That first time I came here, to the refuge: you
knew who I was all along, didn’t you?’

Fallan nodded solemnly.

‘I knew the second I saw you sitting there with Rita in the kitchen,’ he admitted.

Jasmine looked beyond the house, away to the north, away from Fallan. She had to take her eyes off him in order to ready herself,
but she could smell that scent of him again, of the outdoors and of fresh sweat and recent ablutions.

She took a breath, then despite the breeze threatening to swallow her faltering voice, from somewhere found the strength to
say the most difficult four words of her life.